Joy, joylessness, and the American project

One day, an English teacher at my gigantic public high school in Manhattan paused the lesson.

He placed his hands shoulder-width apart on his ancient desk. He hooked his toes on the rim of the chalkboard behind him, and there he was: suspended in the air, floating above the sullen earth toward the end of third period on a dismal November day.

“Have you ever seen anyone do this before?” he asked.

He looked around from his perch, mischievous joy sparkling in his eyes beneath his mop of white hair. He held the pose, and then the period bell rang.

That the teacher happened to be Frank McCourt, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Angela’s Ashes, is only partly relevant. Mr. McCourt was celebrating the weirdness and joy of being human, the possibility and story in every moment.

And, like all good artists, he was messing with our heads to pop us out of our usual selves, into the realms of creativity and new thought that have always moved civilizations forward.

For a teenager unhappy to be in school at all, he was a welcome light.

The Portland Frog reminded me of that moment, now 40 years ago, the way it stood there with its belly out like a 3-year-old asking for cookies, and the unbelievable, cowboy-laconic toughness the suit’s occupant expressed after an ICE agent pepper-sprayed his vent hole: “I’ve definitely had spicier tamales.”

Contrast this great fun to today’s singularly humorless White House, as best exemplified by press secretary Karoline Leavitt. In a recent exchange, a reporter inquired about the significance of a Putin-Trump summit meeting proposed for Budapest, Hungary. Why there? In 1994, that’s where Russia promised not to invade Ukraine if that country gave up its nuclear weapons.

Leavitt responded with a string of insults. But the question was actually interesting and thoughtful: It would have been more fun to mull its implications than to be a jerk.

Deranged as Donald Trump is, he has always been funny. But even that modestly redeeming trait seems gone in this bleakly self-serious White House. If I were an autocrat in training, I’d be worried about that, on durability grounds.

The late anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow are known for rethinking early human history in a way that credits Neolithic peoples with intelligence and whimsy. In the spirit of the Portland Frog or Mr. McCourt, early humans may have initially avoided labor-intensive agriculture because they had other things to do, including storytelling, masquerades, or traveling. Maybe early signs of trade were not nascent capitalism, they argue, but the result of vision quests, or of women gambling.

Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun. Early democracy in the U.S. was certainly colored by those qualities. When an exhausted John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, he went straight to a bar — City Tavern. Pursuit of happiness, anyone? And yes, dark projects occur, but they rarely last long.

Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun.

Visiting my mother recently in that same city of Philadelphia, close to her 88th birthday, I wondered what characteristics lead to a long life and other lasting human projects.

My mom marched in “No Kings” Day. She suggested we visit a unique beer shop with hundreds of ales to get some Thai beer to pair with our meal. And perhaps, she also offered, you would like to attend the euphonium concert I’m hosting tomorrow night?

Helping her declutter her storage closet, I held up a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can. “What are we doing with this?” I asked. “I was saving it because it had the twin towers on it … It might be valuable.”

Indeed, the can featured the skyline of my youth. “It’s art,” I said. “We’ll keep it,” placing it on a shelf for display, an Arabica-scented monument to a city as it once was, still a place of joy and loss and resilience.

Photos from within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers show a contrasting vision of the city: pictures of humans in distress, put upon by violent, masked, monstrous agents. The victims’ faces were a panoply of the diversity of the American experience. Perhaps some were vicious criminals, but most seemed to be moms, children, or laborers.

If they were really Tren de Aragua, would they be crying?

In the contrast between that dungeon and my mom’s happiness project, I caught a glimpse of the reason our country has endured and thrived, even despite many imperfections.

We’ve ultimately rewarded, and been rewarded by, entrepreneurial joy, and those projects have often succeeded: the World’s Fairs, the National Parks, the Eagles.

The purveyors of darkness just aren’t that compelling to those of us who aspire to a measure of glee and wonder in our brief days and years.

That quality may not be enough to save us now, but it’s a force, for certain, to be reckoned with.

Auden Schendler is the author of the book “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.”